Live Launches in 2018

A curated program of performances and interactive projects new to the New York fair

Launching for the first time at Frieze’s seventh consecutive edition in New York, Live is a program of time-based projects across Frieze New York 2018.

Curator Adrienne Edwards is working closely with galleries — who will pay no fees for participation — to present new and historic works centered on performance and participation in the fair’s public areas.

Live at Frieze New York 2018 affirms the fair’s committment to both curated programming and providing support to boundary-pushing practice. Participating artists and galleries will be announced in the coming months.

Frieze enjoys a strong tradition of commissioning artists’ time-based work, with live and participatory works by Dora Budor, Pia Camil, Maurizio Cattelan, Giosetta Fioroni, Liz Glynn, Anthea Hamilton, Ryan McNamara and Eduardo Navarro featured in recent editions of Frieze New York; the first performance work ever acquired for the collection of the Tate, meanwhile, was acquired from Frieze London in 2004.

First introduced at Frieze London 2014, Live has over four editions in London seen visitors sample soup made from ingredients grown at the Fukushima nuclear site, have their portraits drawn by Ken Kagami, engage in political dialogue with a go-go dancer and made .GIFs of elaborate yoga posers. Significant live works by artists including Franz Erhard Walther (2014), Adam Linder (2014), Eva Kot'átková (2015), TUNGA (2015), Mahmoud Khaled (2016), Augustas Serapinas (2016) and Agatha Goethe-Snape (2017) have been presented by leading international galleries from Delhi to Paris, Cairo to London. See a slideshow of selected past highlights here.

Adrienne Edwards will collaborate with Frieze for the first time on Live. Curator at Performa, New York’s first performance biennial, and Curator at Large at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Edwards is also a Corrigan Doctoral Fellow in Performance Studies at New York University and a writer. frieze magazine praised her recent exhibition ‘Blackness in Abstraction’ as: ‘a reckoning between deep formal and cultural legacies that are often at odds’ that is ‘no small feat to behold.’ Edwards will select the presentations and work closely on their realization with galleries..